


schrodinger's cat

by shadowcat500



Series: To Be Grey [6]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Background Relationships, Breaking the Fourth Wall, Existentialism, Feels Like Dissociating, Gen, but that's part of the plot so, half of this is references to work that doesn't exist yet, like discussed but in vague terms, like i really got deep at 1am
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:28:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22326355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowcat500/pseuds/shadowcat500
Summary: and the sun said "it hurts to become"Also known as: Castor knows that he exists only when he needs to: alive and yet pulseless, dead and yet breathing.
Series: To Be Grey [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1303436
Kudos: 2





	schrodinger's cat

**Author's Note:**

> castor- the mortal brother of pollux

When he first opens his eyes, there is a girl. He has lived a life that began ten seconds ago, four years and yet seventeen years all at once.

The beginning starts with an and: his own story, typed into electronic existence, wiped with a button press. His existence could be wiped from existence in a few minutes, every trace of Castor that has ever been gone with a few clicks and taps. Just letter-shaped code, fortuitous existence gone just like that. Begun by need, chosen by luck as a sideshow to another girl’s story: the girl in front of him. Her hair changes and shifts as he watches: straight bob-cut turning into longer, darker curls: skin melanising before his own, pallid tone. Her eyes change in shade and round out, catlike pupils staying hazy like the universe cannot decide between humanity and the city’s (city? something akin to ecstasy dances on his tongue, rounding and shaping into a prism of a word that makes sense but doesn’t, splitting into candy-flavoured shards as he thinks) aesthetical surgical mayhem. She speaks and her words remain hazy, but he knows what she wants and replies in that same nothing of a language. She is Cumin Morganite, his new partner that isisn’t the one that was his responsibility to capture when she saw him and the team he was leading and he knew her record and who she was and all she had accomplished and yet still chose to take her? He doesn’t know why he made such a mistake without talking it through.

He opens his mouth and the world blurs, resolving into a cell that he knows and yet doesn’t: he has only just arrived into a new concrete plane yet he knows his purpose. He and Cumin had tried to escape and he had sacrificed himself to send her onwards, a new Moses on a journey to find help and return with safety.

The days and hours blur like raindrops on a window, theoretical torture making itself known in the scraps of rebellion he scrounges up from his memory yet knows didn’t occur, and the burns winding across the open tears in his uniform. He wakes up to a monster and a child leaning over him, pale and Grey grey hands touching his skin, a long finger pressed to his neck for a pulse. “He’s awake.” says a voice that sounds like death and smells like blood in the air.

They have names: Judge and Sil. Sil chatters while Judge stays silent, looming despite his relaxed kneel on the ground. Judge is inhuman every way from Sunday: a freak of surgery and man’s foolishness, made to suffer for his own luck and tenacity. Sil is an anomaly: a prince and a project and a mutant and and landslide bound into the body of a child. Both freaks, all freaks in the emptiness of the concrete plane. He says something about Cumin and Judge asks about Morgan and Hama and Janus, two of which he knows from a place he’s never been and one he doesn’t know from a place he’ll be on the other side of the next month. 

Weeks pass, Sil speaks and Judge grinds gear against gear and Castor says things they sometimes discount as delusion and sometimes as fever and sometimes as fact in an order that lacks pattern or purpose. Sometimes the beeps that appear and disappear without doors or people sound like music. He knows that nothing exists on the to her side of the door, the door that people sometimes walk out of like a magician’s vanishing and appearing act. A planet the size of a golfball, the size of unrealised dreams and crushable hopes dances sometimes in his sight, a blended part of his being others. Time passes like sand through fingers. 

He gives a speech at some point. Polished and perfect, reeking of introspection and calm. It was about here and yet somewhere that once existed in someone’s head eleven-hundred years ago. The year is 3156 sometimes, yet other’s it’s 2020 in the middle of a concrete plane. The concrete plane is a solid, fun phrase that likes to spin itself into sentences like a weaver’s favourite pattern.

It hurts sometimes, aches and scars knitting themselves into being from wounds he never suffered. Sil and Judge never comment, yet they’re as real as he is.  
Judge has a place far from here, one green eye bearing into a scarlet pair, fingers winding themselves through sapphire locks that catch on a night-black wedding band- a star in his own right in a tale of suffering and hope. He has an existent someone waiting for him, to make their shared existence once more.  
Sil has people, a sister that exists ten years from now, parents that exist in two months time, a grandfather that has existed from five months after Castor’s birth and began and ended with cruelty.  
Castor has parents that exist only in theory, that he will never meet: he will exist till his time ends and he vanishes into open plains in the supposed hope of next year and peace talks. He comes to terms with it.

In no time and yet all of it, freedom comes. Judge is gone and by extension Castor does not exist till he meets eyes with Judge, who clasps him and the body of Sil tight under his arm close and tells them a name that hunts and then shoves them away to defend, to tell them to leave him.

Chaser will be fine, Castor realises. Castor was meant to be a red herring, Chaser was meant to chase hope and a future, and Castor turns and leaves.

And words spin like spider’s thread on a fine line of paper and ink, wrapping and tattooing themselves into a shambling, screaming, sprinting husk that resolves itself into him, Castor, running and running with Sil’s hand clamped tight in his own with the grinding and screaming of a rockslide crashing behind them, coming closer and closer like an avalanche chasing a skier down a slope.

This isn’t his story, he knows that, this time it belongs to the lost soul left behind to be hurt and broken again on some cruel deity’s command: what does it gain from this? Release? Fulfilment? Peace? Neither of them know, but in the falling glass and nameless figures that blend into the dust of the crashing facility, the faces that will wind themselves more and more into existence the further and faster he goes towards the abyssal, ethereal, arguable future that awaits him, he hopes for an answer.

Time blurs and he is at the end: screams blur in and out at the final battle. Chaser will appear as ice clenches at hands that shed their skin to make him exist as distance opens and closes like Charbydis lapping at the ocean thrice a day and thrice a night. Castor will exist and he will not, a motivation for someone long past him till he gains importance and a purpose again. He will fade and not be thought of again. His tale will be known, but the one where he led an army will not as the protagonist of this one stayed at home with a lover. His future will be to fade when once he knew glory. As he vanishes, tale told, he thinks of theoretical milk falling to a fictional floor as a theoretical needle slides into his neck for a fictional sin.

**Author's Note:**

> getting deep at 2am
> 
> my hands are cold
> 
> please give me kudos for my aching hands and frozen tongue that i have sacrificed on the pyre of late night inspiration


End file.
